Back in the summer of 2013, something was stirring in the CAD community. Engineers and executives at Autodesk were teeming with excitement as the date for the company’s latest launch crept ever near.
Then it happened.
On June 25, 2013, Autodesk announced Fusion 360, a cloud-based CAD package that offered nearly everything that Inventor contained, but in package that was notably different from the earlier, desktop offering.
Aside from the fact that Fusion 360's cloud-based background made the software package portable, unshackling engineers from monstrous workstations, the product was also based around a community, making it notably different from any other CAD system that came before it.
"I was one of the first application engineers on the Fusion team," said Curtis Chan. "And I can say that from the beginning, we wanted Fusion to be built around a community."
But why was that important? CAD is for creating virtual models of intellectual property that aren't normally shared freely. Or, at least, that's the way some businesses view it. Increasingly, though, products are being launched by people who are motivated to see their ideas come to life, and who understand that having virtual communities built around them can help support their product development processes whether they need modeling, machining or financial support. This attitude has made many upstart product developers open to sharing their files with larger communities in order to see their ideas come to fruition—and potentially change some small corner of the world in the process.
But as a CAD user, you likely know that sharing and collaborating with a disparate product development team hasn't always been the easiest task. Whether you find yourself lost in file translation, slogging through file libraries linking labyrinths, or just spending too many hours passing a file back and forth until your "change order" has been executed properly, you know the burden that many CAD systems place on people working with outside teams. That's one of the things that Fusion 360 was built to solve.
Fusion 360's Dedication to Community
The standard model used during the May 2018 Autodesk CAM Challenge. Image Courtest of @wagnermachineco (instagram).
Right now, you might be asking yourself, what's community got to do with collaboration? Both words start with the letter "C,” but other than that, they don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. But I think it can be argued that, without community, you’ll never find people you’d like to collaborate with. In that regard, Fusion 360 has been built with community in mind, enabling its users to quickly share projects and put their talents to work on aspects of a project where their expertise lies. But unlike the old “vaulting” systems of yore, Fusion’s collaborative environment makes it possible for multiple users to work on a single design simultaneously. That type of collaboration means that more work can be performed more effectively, and that ideas can easily be communicated while a design is live and loaded in the software. What’s more, with product design deadlines getting ever tighter, having the ability to work in tandem makes meeting daily and weekly production goals less stressful.
The second community aspect of Fusion 360 that should be recognized is Autodesk’s dedication to creating online video tutorials from the outset of the product’s launch. Since 2013, the Fusion team has remain convinced that online video tutorials are the best way to teach CAD users at any experience level how they can get the most out of the software package. But beyond instruction for the software itself, the videos have become an instructive tool that encourages new users to make their own content detailing their processes for CAD, CAM, rendering and more.
“The community around Fusion 360 is a great part of using the software. Between the forums and Instagram, I can post a question and usually get an answer in under an hour, and sometimes as quickly as a couple of minutes,” said Dylan Jackson of Proteum Machining. “When I first started using Fusion 360, I used the online tutorials a bit to fill in gaps on things I couldn't figure out.”
Today, thousands of videos from hundreds of channels routinely garner tens of thousands of views. Topics ranging from “Beginners Tutorials” to “Modeling from a Photo” have populated the web and created a community of users that one only has to reach out to if a collaboration partnership is needed. But that wasn’t the only step that the Fusion team took to foster a sense of community around its CAD package.
Understanding that community was the cornerstone of the product’s success, the team at Autodesk began organizing a competition that focused on Fusion 360’s CAM module.
Competitions and Connectivity That Benefit All
Called the Autodesk CAM Challenge, the competition’s objective was simple. Teams would be provided with a stock model of the Fusion logo, and would then be tasked with milling the model in any way they saw fit.
Dylan Jackson, and Proteum Machining's entry into the May 2018 Autodesk CAM Challenge. An engineer's imagination knows no bounds.
Want to try a particularly tough material to mill? Go for it. Prefer your Fusion logo to have a unique texture? Give it a shot. The Autodesk team just wanted to see what kind of creativity they could generate among its users.
Perhaps one of the cleverest aspects of the Autodesk CAM Challenge was that all entries had to be submitted either via Facebook or Instagram using the hashtag #autodeskcamchallenge. That immediately made the work of any participant visible to the wider world, something that’s not generally easy for a small-time product developer or a hobbyist machinist to achieve. Essentially, the competition was designed to highlight the abilities of Fusion users and make it possible for them to land a few more CAM gigs, gain a bit of investment funding, or maybe even move a few more products.
According to Curtis Chan, the competition worked. “Today we have many users who are selling their services with only Instagram and Fusion. They don’t have a website, but they know the power of community, have the engineering talent, and trust Fusion to help them get a job done.”
Tomorrow's Innovation Platforms
The way the future of innovation will look is already beginning to come into focus. Competitions like the Autodesk CAM Challenge are making it possible for people of all stripes—whether they be career engineers, hobbyists, or even retired machinists—to pick up a challenge and create something.
The fact that makers can so easily share their designs with one another, or even enter a competition via social channels like Instagram, is transforming who can help change the world. When you think of the ecosystem of sharing and collaboration tools that are now at hand, it's becoming clear that these new spaces are opening opportunities for anyone with a product vision, or even the capability to model, mill or render well to strike out on their own and create their own businesses. And for its part, Fusion 360 is finding itself at the nexus of this change, transforming ambition and ideas into tangible products and giving voice to an emerging class of designers.
To learn more about Fusion 360, read the recent engineering.com research report The Best CAD System for the Modern Engineer.
Autodesk has sponsored this post. They have had no editorial input to this post. All opinions are mine. —Kyle Maxey